Jeff Gordon: His Dream, Drive & Destiny

by Joe Garner

  Jeff wasn’t just racing for a win that weekend; he was shooting for the Winston Million, the $1 million bonus R.J. Reynolds offered to any team that could capture three of the Cup’s four major races—the Daytona 500, the Winston 500 at Talladega, the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, and the Southern 500—in a single season. Jeff had already nabbed Daytona and Charlotte, but from the get-go, it looked like Darlington was going to be a bust.

  “We went and tested and we struggled with the car, and we came back and cut it up, put a new snout on it, did all these things,” Evernham recalls. “We worked on it all day. It was probably a fifth-place car.” From the green flag, Jeff wrestled with the No. 24, and the crew continued to hack and hammer away to keep him in it.

  Jeff proudly holds up the 1997 Daytona 500 Championship trophy.

  “We made all kinds of pit stops—spring rubbers in and out, change this, change that. He bounced off the fence; we kept fixing it. The guys were good, the pit stops were good, but I mean, Jeff drove his ass off.” Jeff managed to get close enough to make a run on the leader, Jeff Burton, who had a much stronger car. “And with two laps to go, we’re leading the race with this car that shouldn’t have been running fifth, a car that’s freakin’ destroyed because he hit the fence with it so many times.”

  The two cars touched coming around Turn 4 to take the white flag side-by-side, with Jeff holding off a hard-charging Jeff Burton. After four and a half hours of knockdown, drag-out battling, Jeff—who Rick Hendrick and Ray Evernham always said could do more with a mediocre car than any driver they’d seen—crossed the finish line just ahead of Burton. “Yeah! Yeah, we did it! Holy cow!” he shouted into his radio. It had been an incredible team effort, but it had taken Jeff Gordon to bring it home. “We were out of tires and the pit crew guys were worn out,” Evernham recalls. “My box of tricks had been empty for a hundred miles.” But just as their loss in the 1995 Daytona 500 had brought the No. 24 team together, the 1997 Southern 500 showed what they were capable of overcoming.

  And with that pivotal win, Jeff captured the points lead back from Mark Martin, put the hammer down, and didn’t let up. Nine races later, he was in Atlanta and aiming to seal the deal. “That final race in Atlanta was one of the toughest of my career,” Jeff declares, “a nail biter all the way to checkered.” Ultimately Jeff prevailed and was once again crowned Winston Cup champion.

  The January 25,1998, Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and Denver Broncos made for stirring competition, but Jeff was far more interested in what was going on during the ad breaks. With more than ninety million people tuning in each year for the big game, the Super Bowl’s commercials—then costing about $1.3 million for a thirty-second spot—had become a something of a show in themselves.

  That year, between ads by Budweiser, American Express, MasterCard, and Doritos, with stars like Jerry Seinfeld and boxer Oscar de la Hoya, people saw a Pepsi commercial featuring Jeff Gordon. From a personal branding standpoint, it was a huge boon. “I’ll tell you, Jeff has got a super-smart business head,” says Rick Hendrick. “And not to have been educated in business, he’s got a God-given sense for it.”

  Jeff triumphantly holding up the 1997 Winston $1 million check.

  Jeff proudly stands next to his second Winston Cup Championship trophy, Atlanta Motor Speedway, November 16, 1997.

  Indeed, up until a year before the Super Bowl ad aired, Jeff had a Coca-Cola sponsorship, even appearing in a Coke commercial back in 1995. But in surveying the athlete-endorsement landscape and understanding that NASCAR was now reaching out to a broader audience, he felt like the company could be doing more for him and benefiting more from his image and cache.

  “They almost treated it as a regional sponsorship, which was fine at first,” Jeff says. “But as things were progressing, I hoped for more, especially after winning the first championship. And they did a little bit more. But, at least in racing, they never really wanted to put a lot behind one driver.

  “And I wasn’t trying to be arrogant or selfish, but if you have a consumer product, you tie yourself to someone who is doing well. You could see that in other sports, where they’d tie themselves to an athlete and promote that athlete with their brand.”

  In late 1996, with Rick Hendrick’s blessing, Jeff decided to test the waters and approached Ron Faust, a friend of Brooke’s family who worked for Pepsi, about setting up a meeting with company executives. It was a bold move for a twenty-five-year-old racecar driver. Within days, Jeff, armed with a “wish list” he had prepared with the help of his financial adviser Bob Brannan and marketing consultant Hal Price, was on a plane for PepsiCo headquarters outside Manhattan. A top priority on that list: a Super Bowl commercial.

  “It was all the things we were wanting Coke to do that we didn’t think they were doing,” he says. “And everything we asked for, Pepsi said, ‘Yes, we’re going to do that, yes, we’re going to do that, yes, we’re going to do that.’ And they brought in all the key people to say hello. They were well prepared. And they basically agreed to everything.”

  Having signed a letter of intent with Pepsi, Jeff and his team then set up a meeting with Coca-Cola in Atlanta, where Jeff hoped to let them down easy. But the marketing folks seemed to have gotten a whiff that something wasn’t right in Gordonville and had a presentation ready to go. And while their new plan offered more than it previously did, there were two deal breakers: they wanted Jeff to be part of a group of NASCAR drivers they hoped to promote, and no Super Bowl commercial.

  “So I told them, ‘Listen, this is great and I appreciate it, but we came here because we wanted to inform you that we’re going to make a change.’ They were pretty taken aback. . . . I could see the look in their eyes,” he remembers. “They were like, ‘We can’t let this happen. We’re going to lose our jobs.’ And they just started throwing out anything and everything.” Jeff stopped them. “Guys,” he said, “I’m sorry, but the decision has been made. It’s done, and I’m sorry.” Then he thanked them for everything they had done for him the last few years and walked out.

  “It was a difficult decision,” he says, but just as he’d done four years earlier, when he signed with Hendrick, he realized it would pay off in the long term. “I loved the way Pepsi was thinking about things. They were thinking big picture, and they believed in it.” Jeff’s patience—looking for the right opportunities and playing the long game—is something he admits picking up from his mother and John over the years. “I knew I was doing the right thing,” he says. “I just felt it.”

  An actual page of the handwritten notes Jeff and Hal Price prepared before the Pepsi meeting in 1997.

  From a sponsor’s perspective, Pepsi couldn’t have been happier, and their relationship with Jeff turned into the longest-running endorsement deal the company has ever had with a spokesperson. “They lived up to everything they said they were going to do. They had me plastered all over billboards and soda-machine fronts,” he says. “And we did a Super Bowl commercial.”

  The Super Bowl ad itself featured Jeff, in the midst of a race, attempting to retrieve a rolling can of Pepsi from the floor of his car. Oblivious to his nearby competitors, he goes up on two wheels, drives over the tops of other cars, spins 360s, flips end over end, and eventually drives backward across the finish line, winning the race. In the name of amusement, the moves he pulled were clearly unbelievable and ridiculous. But they were only slightly more ridiculous and unbelievable than what would actually happen on the track in 1998.

  Jeff drives under the checkered flag, waving to the cheering crowd at the 1998 Brickyard 400 for his second Brickyard victory and thirty-fifth career win.

  7

  DON’T STINK UP MY SHOW!

  THE 1961 NEW YORK YANKEES, the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls, Secretariat in 1973, and Martina Navratilova in 1983. In the history of sports, there have been those seasons in which individuals and teams suddenly seem to be invincible. Every ball just falls their way; every mistake somehow turns out to their benefit. Tha
t was 1998 for Jeff Gordon and the No. 24 team.

  It had a rocky start, though. Jeff was sleeping soundly one morning in his Lake Norman home, near Charlotte, when the phone rang. It was his PR person wanting to know if he was coming to the Charlotte track that day. “Of course,” he told her.

  “And she said, ‘Okay, well you realize practice starts in five minutes,’ ” Jeff recalls. “I hang up the phone. I’m just, ‘Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.’ I either forgot to set my alarm before I went to sleep or didn’t set it correctly. Regardless, I was freaking out. Threw clothes on. Got in the car. I was doing ninety miles an hour the whole way to the racetrack, and it’s a thirty-minute drive. And I get to the track, and I’m mortified. Mortified.”

  Sitting up on jack stands was his No. 24, damaged. When he hadn’t shown up for practice, Evernham had asked Terry Labonte to take a few laps so he could get some feedback and information on how the thing was running. Labonte had blown a right front tire and hit the wall.

  “I just knew there was going to be hell to pay,” Jeff says. “I tried to avoid [Evernham] because I knew the wrath that was about to be put on me. . . . And it wasn’t cussing me out. Like with John, it was just all about respect. . . . Evernham said, ‘You let the team down. These guys work their butts off.’ And I told him, ‘I know. There’s no excuse.’ It just made me feel this big,” Jeff says, holding his fingers an inch apart. Jeff personally apologized to everyone on the crew.

  He more than made up for it. After the crew got the car fixed for the race the next day, Evernham says, “That’s when he got on that tear.” Of the year’s twenty-two remaining races, he won ten of them, including another Brickyard and another Southern 500, for a season total of thirteen—a modern-era NASCAR record. He finished second in five of them and third three times. He won four races in a row, becoming the first driver to accomplish that feat since Earnhardt, twelve years earlier. Jeff was so far ahead in the point standings he wrapped up the championship before the season reached its final race.

  It wasn’t just that they won the races, it was the way they won them—by twenty, twenty-five car lengths or more, by lapping drivers multiple times on road courses. “Jeff was literally ten feet tall,” recalls Brian Whitesell, the No. 24’s team engineer at the time. “Just brimming with confidence and aggressiveness. . . . You would really get a feel throughout the weekend that when he walked in on Sunday morning, unless something came out of left field, this is ours.”

  “I’d be out there with a four-, five-, six-, eight-second lead, just on cruise control,” Jeff remembers, “and I’m like, ‘Hmm, man, what am I going to have for dinner?’ And then I’d have to say, ‘Okay, stop that, stop that. Pay attention.’ ”

  The well-tuned Rainbow Warriors make quick work of a tire change at Martinsville, 1999.

  The muscle they showed on the track had all the other teams trying to emulate whatever they did, to no avail. “I’m telling you,” says Evernham, “for a while I felt like, ‘How could this much good stuff keep happening to us?’ One time, we were leading, we pit, he goes back out and runs three or four laps, and then says, ‘I think I got a flat tire.’ So he comes down pit road all by himself. Sure enough, flat rear tire. We change tires, go back out, and we’re in last place. All of a sudden, everybody else panics because we came in and put on tires. So they all pit, and it puts us back in the lead.”

  NASCAR did not like what was happening. The organization was in the business of providing entertainment, and when the competition got too lopsided, they feared fans of the other forty-two drivers would stop paying attention, stop coming to the track, and shut their television sets off.

  “If you get a distinct advantage,” Jeff says, “a big part of their job, at that time, was to find that advantage you have and take it away from you to even out the competition. Back then, NASCAR would adjust things if they felt it necessary. As a competitor, it sucked, but that’s the world we lived in.”

  “Jeff and I got direct orders from Bill France Jr., ‘Don’t stink up my show this week,’ ” Evernham recalls. “He said, ‘You guys need to slow that thing down a little bit or I’ll slow it down for you.’ ” Both Evernham and Jeff found it flattering.

  Still, none of the new rules or regulations that had been designed to curb the No. 24 seemed to work. Other owners accused them of cheating, but NASCAR couldn’t find any evidence. “It’s every competitor’s job to build the best race car they can within the rules, and we did a great job at that,” Jeff contends. “We were a cohesive team, communicated well, executed well, and did our homework. We just had a slight edge in all of these areas.”

  The team ultimately began to slow themselves down. “We had our own theories that NASCAR had a cutoff, where if you got more than a three- or four-second lead on the field, they were going to find a way to throw a caution, because they knew people were tuning out,” Jeff says. “And so what we would do is, if we had that strong a car and got a run, Ray would say certain things to me on the radio so that I would let off and slow the pace to try not to get too big of a lead.”

  “We got accused of sandbagging a lot,” Evernham says, “and the truth is, we were. We still won every race we could, but we didn’t get the lead and go out and lap the field.”

  When a race team’s biggest problem becomes how to slow down, it’s clear they are in a pretty good place. Back in 1994, Evernham had posted a checklist on the shop wall that read, “From Nobody to Upstart—From Upstart to Contender—From Contender to Winner—From Winner to Champion—From Champion to Dynasty.” By 1998, with three championships under their belt, the first four of those had been crossed off.

  Although they started the 1999 season by winning the Daytona 500 for the second time in three years, the bar had now been set so high that even the slightest deviation from perfection cast an outsized shadow. In the first dozen weeks, they racked up three wins but also had two thirty-ninth-place finishes, along with a thirty-first, a thirty-eighth, and a forty-third-place finish.

  Ray Evernham’s checklist for the No. 24 team on the shop wall at Hendrick Motorsports.

  There were races they should have won and didn’t. There were handling problems, suspension issues, tire issues, a crash, and a broken transmission. They hovered around fifth in the point standings for most of the first half of the season, but that was no longer acceptable. Second would have been a letdown.

  “We had a few months where things hadn’t gone great on the track,” Jeff says. “We weren’t as competitive in 1999 as we wanted to be. [Ray and I] were battling a little bit on the radio about what I think we need with the car, and he’s telling me what he thinks we should do. And we just weren’t in sync like we had been.”

  “Our communication was starting to fall apart,” Evernham agrees, a trend he traced back, at least in part, to Jeff and Brooke’s move from North Carolina to Highland Beach, Florida, at the close of 1998. “When Jeff moved to Florida, we saw him a lot less. I don’t think that helped.” But whereas in previous years the pair’s pit-road jawing sessions would end in a laugh, or at least a brotherly agreement that they both wanted what was best for the team, things seemed different now—less constructive and more biting.

  The team celebrates winning their fourth straight Pepsi Southern 500 at Darlington, as well as claiming the Winston No Bull million dollars.

  “As a crew chief, I needed to talk to Jeff the way I needed to talk to him,” Evernham says. “But Jeff didn’t need a guy like that anymore. We’d won three championships, he’d won all these races. . . . It’s like you coach somebody to get them to a certain level, and once they’re at that level, you’ve got to coach them a little bit different. . . . I think if we’d talked about it, I could’ve done that.”

  But the reality is that the squabbles and tensions were indicative of even deeper, more profound frustrations behind the scenes. In some sense, Jeff and Ray, and the entire team, had become victims of their own success. They were without question the premier operation in NASCAR. Indi
vidually and collectively they had lucrative offers from other owners, from agents, from anybody and everybody who saw dollar signs and wanted a piece of the pie. The team was perched like Humpty Dumpty, and it seemed like all it would take was a stiff breeze to make it fall.

  Jeff leads the pack at the 1998 Brickyard 400.

  If anyone had his eye on the horizon, it was Evernham. “I think he was yearning for more,” Jeff says. “We’d had a lot of success, and I think he was looking for the next challenge, whatever that may be.”

  Whitesell saw the same thing in the shop. “Ray had done all he wanted to do as a crew chief. He didn’t necessarily want to stay and click off eight championships so he could say he won the most ever as a crew chief. He had aspirations of bigger, better things for himself.”

  Evernham’s restlessness was no secret. As early as the March race at Darlington, he was interviewed by ESPN about how much longer he planned to soldier on through the day-to-day grind of crew chiefing. “As long as it’s fun,” he replied. “And right now, it’s still fun.” A politic answer, perhaps, but in a word, he wanted control, whether that meant a greater hand in steering the Hendrick ship or an opportunity to own his own team.

  The fact is, he already was an owner. In late 1998, he and Jeff had launched Gordon–Evernham Motorsports, a Busch Grand National team sponsored by the Pepsi-Cola Company. For Jeff—who, along with Rick Hendrick’s son Ricky, raced the No. 24 Pepsi car on a limited schedule in 1999, his first time in the Busch Series since 1992—it represented a business opportunity, a co-branding arrangement from which both he and Pepsi could benefit. For Evernham, it was a chance to escape the “politics and counterpolitics” of being a Hendrick employee and run things his own way without bureaucratic interference.